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Highlights
• Pathways for a circular economy towards the EU goals require policy support that, in turn, requires legitimacy.
• Legitimacy is often contested in the public discourse at all phases in the technological innovation system.
• Legitimacy remains poorly understood for ‘in-between’ technologies that struggle to move from the formative to the growth stage.
• The article explores legitimacy for chemical recycling primarily based on evidence from the UK, Germany, and Italy.
Abstract
The European Commission aims to increase the recycling of plastic packaging to 60% by 2025, requiring fundamental changes towards a more circular economy. Pathways for this transition require policy support that largely depends on their legitimacy in the public discourse. These normative aspects remain poorly understood for ‘in-between’ technologies, i.e., technologies that are no longer novel but struggle to move to the growth phase within the technological innovation system. Therefore, we ask: How do discourses shape technology legitimacy for in-between technologies? Drawing on the empirical example of chemical recycling, the analysis renders two principal findings. First, legitimising and delegitimising storylines present contesting views on in-between technologies regarding their technological aspects, environmental and social impacts, and economic and policy implications. Second, how discourses contribute to technology legitimacy depends on the actors and interests that drive the prevalent storylines in particular contexts.
The 2011 Arab Spring marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border crossings between Libya and Italy, which produced heterogeneous reductions of bilateral smuggling distances between country pairs in the Mediterranean region. We exploit this source of spatial and temporal variation in bilateral distance along land and sea routes to estimate the elasticity of irregular migration intentions for African and Near East countries. We estimate an elasticity of migration intentions to smuggling distances exceeding −3, mainly driven by countries with weak rule of law and high internet penetration. Our findings are consistent across irregular migration measures both at the aggregate and individual levels. We show that irregular migration elasticity is higher for youth, relatively skilled individuals and those with an informative advantage (having a social network abroad or a mobile phone).
In a unifying framework generalizing established theories we characterize under which conditions Joint Ownership of assets creates the best cooperation incentives in a partnership. We endogenise renegotiation costs and assume that they weakly increase with additional assets. A salient sufficient condition for optimal cooperation incentives among patient partners is if Joint Ownership is a Strict Coasian Institution for which transaction costs impede an efficient asset reallocation after a breakdown. In contrast to Halonen (2002) the logic behind our results is that Joint Ownership maximizes the value of the relationship and the costs of renegotiating ownership after a broken relationship.
In its first ten years (2014-2023), the banking union was successful in its prudential agenda but failed spectacularly in its underlying objective: establishing a single banking market in the euro area. This goal is now more important than ever, and easier to attain than at any time in the last decade. To make progress, cross-border banks should receive a specific treatment within general banking union legislation. Suggestions are made on how to make such regulatory carve-out effective and legally sound.
The Federal Reserve has been publishing federal funds rate prescriptions from Taylor rules in its Monetary Policy Report since 2017. The signals from the rules aligned with Fed action on many occasions, but in some cases the Fed opted for a different route. This paper reviews the implications of the rules during the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent inflation surge and derives projections for the future.
In 2020, the Fed took the negative prescribed rates, which were far below the effective lower bound on the nominal interest rate, as support for extensive and long-lasting quantitative easing. Yet, the calculations overstate the extent of the constraint, because they neglect the supply side effects of the pandemic.
The paper proposes a simple model-based adjustment to the resource gap used by the rules for 2020. In 2021, the rules clearly signaled the need for tightening because of the rise of inflation, yet the Fed waited until spring 2022 to raise the federal funds rate. With the decline of inflation over the course of 2023, the rules’ prescriptions have also come down. They fall below the actual federal funds rate target range in 2024. Several caveats concerning the projections of the interest rate prescriptions are discussed.
In times of crisis, insurance companies may invest into riskier assets to benefit from expected price recoveries. Using daily stock market data for 34 European insurers, I investigate how a stock market contraction, as experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, affects insurers’ decision on the allocation of their corporate bond portfolio. I find that insurers shift their portfolio holdings pro-cyclically towards lower credit risk assets in the first month of the market contraction. As the crisis progresses, I find evidence for counter-cyclical investment behavior by insurers, which can neither be explained by credit rating downgrades of held bonds nor by hedging with CDS derivatives. The observed counter-cyclical investment behavior of insurers could be beneficial for the financial system in attenuating price declines, but excessive risk-taking by insurance companies over longer periods can also reinforce stress in the system.
The economic rise of China has changed the global economy. The authors explore China’s transformation from a low-cost manufacturing hub to an increasingly innovation- and service-driven economy. Major growth drivers for the period 2010-2025 are analysed, including the paradigms of “Made in China” and the “Dual Circulation Strategy”. The export intensity of China’s economy is declining overall, with a tendency towards greater regional diversification and a gradual decoupling from North America and the European Union. At the same time, trade and investment activities are increasingly geared to the Belt and Road Initiative. Furthermore, labour and energy cost advantages for manufacturing operations in China are likely to diminish in the coming years, calling into question China’s attractiveness as a global manufacturing hub. In this regard, the further development of regional and industrial clusters is pivotal for China to enhance its global competitiveness and remain an attractive destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) in the medium term. On the other hand, high productivity in science and technology and rich deposits of critical minerals put China in a favourable position in advanced industries. Important challenges include the still wide development gap between rural and urban areas, the structural mismatch in the labour market, with persistently high youth unemployment, and the race to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.